Summer in Abaddon

Touch and Go; 2004

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The title of Pinback's third album, Summer in Abaddon, sounds like a morbid joke: It implies a hiatus or a vacation, a productive retreat to perhaps an artists' commune or an off-season spent at a remote hideaway. But Abaddon is not the name of a small coastal town or a resort near the Poconos: Deriving from Hebrew, it refers to the pits of hell, a place of annihilation and destruction where its dwellers become unimaginably small and brutally insignificant. The word is also the name of the angel/demon who reigns over this kingdom of pitch; he is death incarnate.

It's a word pendulously heavy with slithery meaning, but Pinback's album isn't about physical suffering. For the band's two mainstays-- Armistead Burwell Smith IV, formerly of 3 Mile Pilot, and Rob Crow (Thingy and ex-Heavy Vegetable)-- hell is creative stagnation. It is the inability to make music. Surprisingly, Summer in Abaddon, the band's first release for Touch & Go, is arguably their best record yet, a logical and accessible realization of a sound they've been developing for more than six years.

Appropriately, the album plays as a chronicle of time wasted; its songs are full of romantic cul-de-sacs, barroom blackouts, and crossword puzzles. The disc opens with "Non Photo-Blue", an image of modern futility: "She's posting all the time, but the boards are down." "Fortress" describes a "sick summer in bed," spending "days with the light off, freezing." Death looms over "Bloods on Fire", as Crow and Smith eulogize a friend: "Here's to the pranks we never pulled/ And never will." Yet, while Summer in Abaddon is bleak, it's not without an appropriately dark and self-effacing sense of humor, one best glimpsed in the chorus of "This Red Book": "I could strangle you all/ Did I say that out loud?"

If the lyrics recount endless unproductive hours, then Pinback's music steadily ticks off the seconds and minutes. The band-- which on this release also includes Kenseth Thibideau, Cameron Jones, and Ryan Bromley-- has always been rhythmically tight, but on Summer in Abaddon, they sound clockwork precise: The drums, guitars, and bass lock together like cogs turning against each other: one moving the next moving the next moving until they form a Mobius strip groove. If "Sender" didn't fade out, the instrumental interplay could imaginably go on for months until its gears finally wound down. Even the name Pinback-- taken from the sci-fi movie Dark Star-- suggests something mechanical, like a wind-up robot.

On the first few songs of Summer in Abaddon, there seem to be few sustained notes outside of voice and background synths; instead, the emphasis is on points of sound. At times, the songs evoke the rapid fire of synapses as the brain develops a series of ideas. Such a precise sound suggests clinical, cloistered detachment, a self-imposed isolation of extreme introversion. However, as the album progresses, it grows slightly more lush and louder-- albeit it no less dynamic or desolate. "The Yellow Ones" sets a ponderous piano line against ever-steady drum beats and whistling keyboards, creating a hushed nocturne. By contrast, "AFK" ends the album with an aggressive and maybe even outraged punk energy, as if Crow and Smith are trying to will their way out of the abyss.

Compared to earlier Pinback songs such as "June" and "Some Voices", the 10 tracks on Summer in Abaddon initially sound less dramatic; the band has opted to convey their ideas and emotions through subtle implication and impressionistic lyrics. Despite the tremendous metaphysical weight they carry, the songs glide by with an unhindered fluidity, verses unceremoniously giving way to choruses and back again. The dynamics are often subdued, but Pinback aren't emotionally distant as much as indirect. If the album is the product of wasted time, it does not reflect that waste. And therein lies the knotty paradox at the heart of Summer in Abaddon: Pinback's darkest hours have inspired their finest moment.